“Music gives such pleasure that human nature cannot live without it, ” said Confucius.
Music is essential says Victor Hugo because “ it expresses what cannot be put into words and what cannot remain silent.”
The acclaimed neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist and musician Daniel Levitin explores the mystery of music and how music affects our brains, thoughts and our spirit. He says :
The moods that music creates are part of its mystery. What most of us turn to music for is an emotional experience. Because music has the power to induce a certain emotion that will bring back a certain memory, an experience or an emotional state. Through the associations it creates, it enables the listener to access the inner world and discover his own connections. This makes the music more meaningful.
Understanding why we love music and what draws us to it is a window on the essence of human nature…. By better understanding music and where it comes from, we can better understand our motives, fears, desires, memories, and even our communication in the broadest sense… what music can teach us about our brains, ourselves, and our soul.
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The power of music to evoke emotions is harnessed by advertising executives, filmmakers, military commanders, and mothers. Music is being used to manipulate our emotions – from somber nostalgia to a gleeful pleasure. NASA and pre-eminent psychoacoustic laboratories have shown that listening to music and musical therapy can help people overcome a wide range of psychological and physical problems.
In his book This is Your Brain On Music, Levitin asks the following questions :
Why does some kind of music move us and while another annoys us, and we reach for the off button ?
Are musical memories different from other memories?
How is a connection established between the musician and the listener?
He gives the answers extracted from the findings of cognitive psychology and his deep musical knowledge, drawn with striking examples in his book:
We have the cognitive capacity to detect wrong notes and to find music we enjoy, to remember hundreds of melodies… and to tap our feet in time with the music – an activity that involves a a process of meter extraction so complicated that most computers cannot do it.
Music, then, he defines as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to experience emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music. The structure of the scales and chords has something to do with it as does the structure of our brains. The brain’s computational system combines these into a coherent whole, based on what it thinks it ought to be hearing and based on expectations.
Musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain and every neural subsystem that we know about.
Sound is a mental image – a pitch – created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules which impinge on the eardrums, setting off a chain of a chain of mechanical and neurochemical events, the end product of which is an internal image we call pitch. Rhythm is the crucial part of what turns sounds into music and sets the emotional tone of the music we hear – joy, excitement, serenity, romance, danger, exultation, etc. A single high note can convey excitement, a single low note sadness. Tempo is another factor in conveying emotion. Songs with fast tempos tend to be regarded as happy, and songs with slow tempos as sad.
Levitin emphasizes the importance of rhythm:
Rhythm is a key marker in our appreciation of a given musical genre or piece. Rhythm and melody cause music to stick in our heads. That’s the reason why many ancient myths, epics and even the Old Testament were set to music to be passed down by oral tradition across generations.
He verifies that we give meaning to music from early childhood on and explains how musical structures and brain structures develop in interaction :
Our ability to make sense of music depends on experience, and on neural structures that can learn and modify themselves with each new song we hear, and with each new listening of an old song. Our brains learn a kind of musical grammar that is specific to the music of our culture, just as we learn to speak the language of our culture. We have an innate capacity to learn and enjoy any of the world’s musics just as we learn a language, especially during the critical years of neural development after birth. It is when the basic structural elements are incorporated in the wirings of our brains. Young children start to show a preference for the music of their culture by age two. Researchers point to the teen years (ages 10-14) as the turning point for musical preferences.
As adults, the music we tend to feel nostalgic for, the music that feels like it is “our” music, corresponds to the music we heard during these years. In spite of memory loss incurred in elders, many of these old-timers still remember how to sing the songs they heard when they were fourteen. Part of the reason why we remember songs from our teen age years is because those years were times of self-discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged.
In general, we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to “tag” the memories as something important. Part of the reason has to do with neural maturation and pruning; it is around fourteen that the wiring of our musical brains is approaching adultlike levels of completion. The brain’s synapses are programmed to grow for a number years, making new connections. After that time, there’s a shift towards pruning, to get rid of unneeded connections. Those that are labeled “important” are restored in long-term memory.
On the characteristics that distinguish musical memories from other memories :
A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. The music that you have listened to at various times in your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. As soon as we hear a song that we have not heard since a particular time in our lives, the floodgates of memory open and we are immersed in memories. Thus memory affects the music-listening experience profoundly. As neuroscience shows, our memory system is intimately related to our emotional system.
The types of sounds, rhythms, and musical textures we find pleasing are generally extensions of previous positive experiences we’ve had with music in our lives. This is because hearing a song that you like is a lot like having another sensory experience like eating chocolate, smelling coffee in the morning, seeing a work of art or seeing the face of someone you love. We take pleasure in the sensory experience and find comfort in its familiarity, and anticipate that it will be safe.
How does expectations lead to emotion while listening to music, the factors that determine our musical preferences and on the role of the composer :
The balance of simplicity and complexity in music also informs our preferences. When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable. The musical piece which is too predictable, the “move” from one note or chord to the next contains no element of surprise. We find it unchallenging and simplistic. As the music is playing (particularly if you are engaged with focused attention), your brain is thinking ahead to what the different possibilities for the next note are, where the music is going, its intended trajectory and its ultimate end point. The composer has to lull us into a state of trust and security; yet he gives the “going back home” effect in the closure. We have to allow him to take us on a harmonic journey; Throughout the melody, he has to give us enough little rewards – completions of expectations – that we feel a sense of order and place.
We must allow the composer to take us on a harmonious journey, lulled by trust and security, while giving us small rewards – just enough to meet our expectations – so that we feel a sense of order and space.
For example, when Tchaikovsky wanted the listener to think of Arab or Chinese culture in his ballet The Nutcracker, he chooses scales that are typical to their music, and within just a few notes, we are transported to the Orient. When Billie Holiday wants to make a standard tone bluesy, she invokes the blues scale and sings notes from a scale that we are not accustomed to hearing in standard classical music. Composers deliberately used these connections that they knew well.
The type of music a person likes is, to some extent, related to their personality traits. Levitin says that to a large degree, it is determined by where one went to school, the milieu where one grew up, and what kind of music they happened to be listening to.
However, the most important factor is the musician’s performance, he says and explains:
In the end, the essence of musical performance is being able to convey emotion.
What most of us turn to music for is an emotional experience. So much of the research on musical expertise has looked for accomplishment in the wrong place, in the facility of fingers, rather than the expressiveness of emotion. Musical expertise has to be about more than strict technique. An expert musician knows how to move a listener. He has the ability to draw us into a performance so that we forget about everything else.
If the composer is skillful, those parts of the piece that become our landmarks will be the very ones that the composer intended they should be. His knowledge of composition and human perception and memory will have allowed him to create certain “hooks” in the music that will eventually stand out in our minds.
As Plato said it one millennium ago :
Music and rhythm find the way to the hidden corners of the soul.
Levitin concludes:
…We surrender to music when we listen to it – we allow ourselves to trust the composer and musician with a part of our hearts and our spirits. We let the music take us somewhere outside ourselves. Many of us feel that great music connect us to something larger than our own existence, to other people, or to God.
The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.
Duygu Bruce
Note: The musicians and the songs included in this post are selected from the examples presented by Daniel Levitin in his book This is Your Brain on Music.
